Shuttle Readies For Historic Link With Space Station

The space shuttle Atlantis was preparing for a dramatic docking with the Russian space station Mir Thursday after soaring into orbit from its Florida launch pad Tuesday afternoon.

The shuttle will have spent two days slowly catching up to the Mir as the two spacecraft are readied for their historic celestial embrace. Atlantis roared off its launch pad at 3:32 p.m. EST Tuesday, ending a four-day delay due to stormy weather that had lashed the Kennedy Space Center.

The bad weather had washed out the two previous launch attempts.

The shuttle took a turn up the Atlantic Coast as it headed for an orbit that will allow it to rendezvous with Mir Thursday at about 9:05 a.m.

“Godspeed on the 100th U.S. manned mission in space,” launch controller Jim Toohey told the crew just before liftoff.

Aboard the shuttle was a crew of seven, including two Russian cosmonauts who will relieve the current station crew of two Russians and American astronaut Norman Thagard. The trio have been aboard the station since March 16.

The docking would be the first mating of U.S. and Russian spacecraft since the July 1975 link-up of a Soviet Soyuz craft and an American Apollo capsule. That “handshake in space” 20 years ago was a symbolic gesture with little lasting impact.

But the shuttle-Mir docking - the first of seven such visits planned during the next two years - is to help set the stage for Russian-American cooperation in the building of a multinational space station starting in 1997. The station, called Alpha, is scheduled for completion by 2002. It would succeed the aging Mir as a permanently staffed human outpost in orbit.

Besides days of bad weather, the launch process was complicated by the narrow window - just 10 minutes - in which Atlantis had to lift off in order to fly its precise, fuel-saving trajectory to rendezvous with Mir.

On Friday, lightning in the vicinity of the launch pad made it too dangerous to fuel the shuttle. On Saturday, crews filled the shuttle’s fuel tank but the weather did not clear and officials at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided to wait until Tuesday for another launch attempt.

The shuttle is under the command of Robert L. “Hoot” Gibson, a veteran astronaut who earned his pilot’s license as a teenager. Gibson will do the delicate manuevers as the Atlantis, approaching from below, edges toward the ungainly, T-shaped Mir.

While the two spacecraft zip around the Earth at 17,500 mph, Gibson will creep the shuttle toward Mir’s docking port at just over an inch per second. At the end, he’ll have to keep the 100-ton Atlantis within 3 inches of the approach path centered on Mir’s 5-foot-wide docking port. Because of the need to maintain contact with a ground station in eastern Russia during the docking, Gibson must complete the final stages of the maneuver during a two-minute period.

The first shuttle-Mir docking comes after the shuttle Discovery approached to within 37 feet of Mir in February during a successful trial run.